C. S. Lewis’s autobiography Surprised by Joy
(1955), like most of his books, contains a great number of allusions to
unspecified sources, including literal quotations. It is perhaps never vitally
important to know these sources; yet tracing them can be a rewarding
enterprise. Here is a listing by chapter of many such words and phrases with
brief references to what I have found to be their sources and, occasionally,
notes suggesting their relevance to the context in which Lewis uses them. I
have also included a few other items where a short explanation may be of use to
some readers. The list has its origin in the notes I added to
my Dutch translation of the book, published in 1998 as Verrast door Vreugde. Double question marks in bold type – ?? – follow
items where I have not found the required information. Correc­tions and additions, including
proposed new entries, are welcome.

This website also features an INDEXof writers and writings quoted in Surprised by Joy. The
Index contains additional infor­mation in the form of dates for most of the items, including those not dealt with in the
notes below. For example, “Bekker’s Charicles”
in chapter IV of Surprised by Joy is not in the notes, but is briefly
identified (and Bekker’s name
corrected to Becker) in the Index.

Neither had ever listened for the horns of elfland : From Tennyson’s poem, “The splendour falls on castle walls” etc. in The Princess (1847), between parts
III and IV. “O sweet
and far from cliff and scar / The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!” Cf. what Lewis wrote in a letter of 25 March 1933 to his friend Arthur
Greeves about a recent talk with J. R. R. Tolkien, “We agreed that
for what we meant by romance there must be at least the hint of another
world – one must ‘hear the horns of elfland’.” Collected
Letters vol. II (2004), p. 103.

In addition to

County Down : County in Northern Ireland, immediately south of Belfast.

The other blessing

the Blue Flower : A symbol of romantic longing in the novel Heinrich von
Ofterdingen (1802), by Novalis.

If aesthetic experiences

Prayer Book : The Book of Common Prayer, service book of the Anglican
Church. Large parts of it were written by Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556). By 1662
it had the form in which it was to survive for more than three centuries.

I soon staked out

What more felicity can fall to creature... : Spenser, “Muiopotmos”, 209–210, in Complaints
(1591).

Of the books that

dark backward and abysm of time : Shakespeare, The Tempest
I.2, 49.

Tenniel : Sir
John Tenniel (1820–1914), cartoonist in the satirical magazine Punch and
illustrator of Alice in Wonderland.

­The first is itself

there suddenly arose in me without warning... :According
to Dorothee Sölle in her Mystik und Widerstand (1997, translated as The
Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, 2001) Lewis is here quoting or
alluding to the 14th-century anonymous mystical work The Cloud of Unknowing,
chapter IV. It is impossible to be sure whether this is indeed a case of
quotation or allusion, but there is an undeniable relevance of the Cloud
passage to what Lewis says here.

“enormous bliss” : Milton, Paradise
Lost V, 297.“...for Nature here / Wantoned as in her
prime, and played at will / Her virgin fancies, pouring forth more sweet, /
Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.”

’Іοϋλίαν
ποθω / Oh, I desire too much : ?? The phrase really consists of three words and may
be transcribed as Iou, lian potho (“Oh, / too much / I desire”)

The third
glimpse

I heard a voice... : Longfellow, “Tegnér’s Drapa”, in The Seaside and the
Fireside (1849). Lewis is quoting the first half of the stanza. The second
half runs: “And
through the misty air / Passed like the mournful cry / Of sunward sailing
cranes.” The poem
is not a translation in blank verse, as Lewis says it is, but original
work by Longfellow, viz. a lament (drapa) in Old Norse style on the
death of the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér.

Chapter II:Concentration Camp

No
Englishman will

Kalevala : Finnish national epic, compiled from folk poetry by Elias
Lönnroth in the years 1835–1849.

Our destination was

“Green Hertfordshire”, Lamb calls it : Charles Lamb (1775–1834), “Amicus Redivivus”, seventh paragraph,
in Last Essays of Elia (1833). Lamb was born and raised in London, but
he and his sister spent many holidays with their grandmother at Blakesware, a
large country house in Hertfordshire which he fondly remembered and described
in later years.

The curious thing

Which like to rich and various gems inlaid... : Milton, Comus
(1634), 22–23. “...the sea-girt isles / That, like to rich and various gems,
inlay / The unadorned bosom of the deep...”

You may ask

“to treat of the good that I found there” : Dante, Inferno I, 8.
“...ma per
trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai...”

First, I learned

“the slow maturing of old jokes” : G. K. Chesterton, George
Bernard Shaw (1910), in the long last section called “The Philosopher” (at about one
quarter the length of that section from its beginning; penultimate sentence of
the paragraph starting “Now the reason why our fathers did not make
marriage...”):

All the things that make monogamy a success are
in their nature undramatic things, the silent growth of an instinctive
confidence, the common wounds and victories, the accumulation of customs, the
rich maturing of old jokes.

The
reader will

Dr Grimstone’s school in Vice Versa : A famous school story published in
1882, Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers by F. Anstey tells about a
father who is magically transformed into his son and vice versa, so that the father
experiences the harsh and sordid reality of school life.

So much for

to be stayed with flagons and comforted with apples... : Song of Songs
2:5.

In attempting to give

Martial, ... “This case, I beg...” : From Epigrammata VI.19.

But I must not

Garuda Stone : See note on F. Anstey’s Vice Versa, above. The
Garuda Stone is the magical device by which father and son swap roles.

Chapter III: Mountbracken and Campbell

chapter
motto

For all these fair people, etc. : Free rendering of lines 48–55 of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, a late 14th-century anonymus poem. The
original passage starts with the words “with all the wele of the worlde”. In
chapter XIV (see note there) this phrase appears to have been partly confused
with another passage from Sir Gawain.

To
speak of my

a Fabian : Fabianism was an English variety of democratic socialism
during the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

I am always glad

before Arnold : i.e. before the time of the Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), English
educational reformer.

Much
the most

Sohrab and
Rustum : A poem by the English poet
Matthew Arnold (1822-88, son of Thomas Arnold), first published in 1853.

ogni parte ad ogni parte splende: Dante,
Inferno VII, 75. “Each part emitting its radiance to each other part” – “Each part” means
each of the nine angelic choirs; “each other part” means each of the nine
celestial spheres.

Chapter IV: I
Broaden my Mind

chapter
motto

I struck the board... : George Herbert, “The Collar” (from The
Temple, 1633).

In
January 1911

just turned thirteen : Born on 29 November 1898, he had in fact just turned twelve.

Tamburlaine : Tamburlaine the Great (1590)
by Christopher Marlowe, tragedy in blank verse about the life, conquests, and
death of the 14th-century Mongol conqueror Timur the Lame, or Timurlane.

Browning’s Paracelsus : Dramatic poem by the English poet Robert Browning (first
published 1835) based on the life of the Swiss doctor, alchemist and
philosopher Paracelsus (1493-1541). He has an obsessive lust for knowledge;
although he is aware of the importance of love, he does not discover the true
and fruitful relationship between love and knowledge until he dies.

The
smoking was

Hippodrome : Originally denoting an open-air court for horse and chariot
races in ancient Greece and Rome, the English word has come to cover a variety of popular entertainments. The Royal
Hippodrome (or “New Vic”) was a Belfast theatre built in 1907 and demolished in
1996. Lewis also mentions the Empire Theatre of Varieties, which lasted from
1894 till 1965.

Most reluctantly, venturing

I
believe... One does feel : Ronald
Knox, Absolute and Abitofhell (1913). “When suave politeness, tempering
bigot zeal / Corrected I believe to One does feel.”

One
reason why

prattler : George Herbert, “Conscience” (from The Temple,
1633). “Peace, pratler,
do not lowre: / Not a fair Look, but thou dost call it foul: / Not a sweet dish,
but thou dost call it sowre: / Musick to thee doth howl. / By listning to thy
chatting fears / I have both lost mine eyes and eares...”

To these nagging

by maistry : Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection I.33.

...lift up
thine heart to God acknowledging thy wretchedness, and cry mercy with a good
trust of forgiveness. And strive no more therewith, nor hang no longer
thereupon, as thou wouldest by mastery not feel such wretchednesses.
(ed. Evelyn Underhill 1923.)

There was another

Lucretius : De rerum natura II, 180.

We
became – at least

knut : obsolete
word for dandy.

Pogo’s communications, however

“looked upon to lust after her” : Matthew 5:28

Chapter
V:Renaissance

chapter
motto

Traherne: Thomas
Traherne (1637–1674), Anglican divine; author of Centuries of Meditations,
first published in 1908. Each of the five chapters in this book contain one
hundred meditations and are therefore called “Centuries”. The present quotation
is from the first Century’s second medtiation.

This
long winter

as the poet says, “The sky had turned round”: Charles Williams, “Palomides before
his christening”, 77, from Taliessin through Logres (1938).

the sunward-sailing cranes : See note to I heard a voice... in
chapter I.

Descend to earth, descend, celestial Nine... : This poem in so far as it has
survived (792 lines of it) has been published, along with much more otherwise
unpublished poetry, by Don W. King in his book C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio, 2001).
The present poem appears as the first item
in Appendix One.

But they were

Clovelly: A
picturesque fishing village in Cornwall, in the South-West of England.

John Betjeman: English
poet (1906–1984); he was a pupil of C. S. Lewis’s at Magdalen College,
Oxford, during the years 1926–1927.

The interesting thing

the Seventh Benjamin (a rabbit, as you will have guessed) : An allusion to
Beatrix Potter’s Benjamin Bunny (1904).

Chapter VI:Bloodery

chapter
motto

Any way for Heaven sake...: John Webster (English dramatist, c.
1580–1634), The Duchess of Malfi, IV.2. The words quoted are spoken by
the Duchess to her murderers shortly before they kill her.

Going to the Coll

Park Lane: Street
near Hyde Park, where traditionally the richest people in London live.

As we sat round

Chesterfield... Stanhope: Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773) wrote
the Letters to his Son, Philip Stanhope (1774) to help this (natural) son
to avoid the mistakes which Chesterfield had himself made in the course of his
life.

In justice to Wyvern

As common as a barber’s chair: perhaps an allusion to Shakespeare,
All’s well that ends well II.2, 18. “It is like a barber’s chair, that fits all
buttocks.”

Indeed, taking them

the Marconi period : Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), inventor of radio telegraphy
and Nobel laureate for Physics 1909. He worked mostly in England. In 1912 the
Marcony Company secured a big order from the British government. A scandal
followed when it appeared that several ministers, including the Prime Minster
Lloyd George, owned shares in this company. See G. K. Chesterton’s Autobiography
(1936), chapter IX, “The case against corruption”.

Chapter VII: Light
and Shade

chapter
motto

Goldsmith : Oliver Goldsmith (1731–1774), English novelist. The
quotation is from his best-known novel, the Vicar of Wakefield, where it
is the headline of chapter XXV.

I have
now

Mr Ian Hay : John Hay Beith, alias Ian Hay (1876–1952), The
Lighter Side of School Life (1914), p. 107.

“G. B. S.” and“G. K. C.” : George Bernard
Shaw (1856–1950) and Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936). Lewis is refer­ring
to The Lighter Side of School Life, a series of pen-pictures by the
witty and popular novelist Ian Hay (John Hay Beith, 1876–1952); chapter 4 of
that book is on “Boys”, i.e. schoolboys, in two sections, “The Government” and
“The Opposition”. The latter section has the following episode (pp. 106–107):

...Then comes the
Super-Intellectual – the ‘Highbrow.’ He is a fish out of the water with a vengeance, but he does
exist at school –
somehow. He congregates in places of refuge with other of the faith; and they
discuss the English Review, an mysterious individuals who are only
referred to by their initials – as G. B. S. and G. K. C. Sometimes he initiates
these discussions because they really interest him, but more often, it is to be
feared, because they make him feel superior and grown-up. Somewhere in the
school grounds certain youthful school­mates of his, inspired by precisely
similar motives but with different methods of procedure, are sitting in the
centre of a rhododendron bush smoking cigarettes. In each case the idea is the
same – namely, a hankering after meats which are not for babes. But the smoker
puts on no side about his achievements, whereas the ‘highbrow’ does. (...) Intellectual snobbery is a rare thing among boys,
and therefore difficult to account for.

But
this innocence

enormous bliss : See note to chapter I.

What
an answer

As Aristotle remarked, men do not become dictators to become warm : Aristotle, Politics
II.7 (1267a, 15), “...the greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity.
Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence
great is the honor bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills
a tyrant.”

a delicacy,
to lack which argued “a gross and swainish disposition”: Freely quoted from John Milton, An Apology for Smectymnuus
(1642), I –

“Nor blame it, readers, in those years to
propose to themselves such a reward, as the noblest dispositions above other
things in this life have sometimes preferred: whereof not to be sensible when
good and fair in one person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judgment, and
withal an ungentle and swainish breast.” (from the intro­ductory
section).

Lewis also quotes this,again freely,in his chapter on Sidney and Spenser in English Literature in the
Sixteenth Century, II/1, p. 339, in Sidney’s Arcadia:

“We can hardly doubt that it was among the lofty romances which Milton
acknowledged as his textbooks of love and chastity, replete with those beauties whereof ‘not to be sensible argues a gross and swainish disposition’.”

Corpus Poeticum Boreale: edited by Gudbrand Vigfusson &
F. York Powell, published in two volumes, Oxford 1883. Subtitle: The Poetry
of the Old Northern Tongue from the earliest times to the nineteenth century.
I: Eddic Poetry; II: Court Poetry.

Asgard
: “God-garden”; abode of the Aesir, i.e. the gods of
Germanic mythology such as Odin, Thor and Loki.

Cruachan
: Capital of the old Irish province of Connacht.

the Red Branch: A
fortified palace in Tara (north ofDublin), abode of the ancient Irish kings; also an order of knights who
had the right to live there.

Tir-nan-Og : Tír na nOc, “Land of Youth”, was one of the regions of the
other world where the dispossessed gods in ancient Irish mythology might go
after leaving Ireland. Anyone returning from there to the world of mortals
found that either much more or much less time had passed there than in the
other world.

Cuchulain, Finn : Hero figures with supernatural powers in Celtic mythology;
principal figures in the Ulster Cycle and the Fenian (or Ossianic) Cycle
respectively. Cú Chulainn, or “hound of Culann”, was called after the dog whose killing was the first
feat in his short and violent life as defender of Ulster. He was especially
feared and famous for his battle-frenzy, and he was invincible, but not
invulnerable. Finn, or Fionn mac Cumhaill (also Finn MacCool or Fingal), was
the father of the bard Ossian.

But the Northernness

Loki replied, “I pay respect to wisdom not to strength”:Fragments from Lewis’s early work “Loki Bound” have survived and were
published by Don W. King in 2001 (see
note to Descend to earth etc. in chapter V, above, ). The “Loki”
fragments appear as the second item in Appendix One – and do not contain the present line.

Chapter VIII: Release

chapter motto

Pearl : An anonymous
late-14th-century poem on a father’s
grief at the death of his infant daughter. The lines quoted, “As Fortune is wont, at her chosen hour,” etc., are 129–132.

A few chapters ago

leprechauns: A
type of dwarf in Irish fairy tales.

The hours my father

Mahaffy: John
Pentland Mahaffy (1839–1919), Professor of Ancient History at Trinity College,
Dublin, where he was Provost from 1914 onwards.

Jowett: Benjamin
Jowett (1817–1893), Regius Professor of Greek at Balliol College, Oxford, where
he was Master from 1870 onwards. See note to The Master of Balliol in
chapter IX.

Such was the situation

Sandhurst: Location
of the Royal Military Academy.

I
should be sorry

as the proverb has it, like an ass to the harp: See Erasmus, Adagium 335 (asinvs ad lyram).

Chapter IX: The
Great Knock

chapter
motto

Lord Chesterfield: See
note to chapter VI. The quotation (inaccurate) is from Chesterfield's letter
dated at Bath, October 19, 1748.

If
Kirk’s ruthless

The Master of Balliol : Very probably Jowett (see note to chapter
VIII, above). He was an influential figure in Oxford during the latter decades
of the nineteenth century as many other colleges came to be headed by Balliol
graduates.

It will be imagined

ful drery was hire chere: Chaucer, Canterbury Tales,
The Clerk’s Tale, 458. “Al drery was his cheere and his lookyng.”

Having said that

McCabe: Joseph
Martin McCabe (1867–1955) left the Franciscan Order and the Roman Catholic
Church in 1896; for the rest of his life he was a militant rationalist and
freethinker and a prolific writer. He had just died at the time when Surprised
by Joy was published.

The Golden Bough : A thirteen-volume work on religious anthropology by J. G.
Frazer, published in1890–1915.

“eucatastrophe” (as Professor Tolkien would call it) : J. R. R. Tolkien
coined this word to denote a modified form of Happy Ending, as a distinctive
feature of fairy-stories. See “On Fairy-Stories”, his Andrew Lang Lecture at
the University of St Andrews in March 1939, first published in 1947, then in
1964, and lastly in 1983 in a volume of his essays called The Monsters and
the Critics. In the fourth paragraph from the end of the section called
“Recovery, Escape, Consolation” (p. 153 in the 1983 edition), Tolkien says

... At
least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function;
but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a
word that expresses this opposite – I will call it Eucatastrophe. The
eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more
correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no
true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which
faire-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially escapist,
nor “fugitive”. In its fairy-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is a sudden and
miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the
existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of
these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much
evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium,
giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant
as grief.

Charlotte M. Yonge: English
novelist (1823–1901), much in favour with the Oxford Movement. She was a Sunday
school teacher all her life.

Pylos : Residence
of King Nestor in Homer’s Odyssey. In Book III Telemachus, starting his
quest for his father Odysseus, is kindly received at the aged king’s court but
gets no useful information. Since excavations in the mid-20th century, ancient
“sandy Pylos”, as Homer often calls it, is believed to have been the location
of present-day Pylos-Navarino, on the southern west coast of the
Peleponnese.

Sir Maurice Powicke : Frederick Maurice Powicke (1897-1963), medieval
historian, Regius Professor of History at Oxford from 1929. His many works
include a volume the 13th century in the Oxford History of England, published
in 1953. Location of the saying about “civilised people in all ages” unknown. – ??

Smewgy and Krik

My debt to him is very great : In
his earlier book Miracles (1947),
chapter X, Lewis refers to Kirkpatrick as

The very man who taught
me to think – a hard, satirical atheist (ex-Presbyterian) who doted on the Golden Bough and filled his house with
the products of the Rationalist Press Association ... and he was a man as
honest as the daylight, to whom I here willingly acknowledge an immense debt.
His attitude to Christianity was for me the starting point of adult thinking;
you may say it is bred in my bones. And yet, since those days, I have come to
regard that attitude as a total misunderstanding.

Chapter
X: Fortune’s Smile

chapter
motto

The fields, the floods...: Spenser, The Faerie Queene
I.ix.12, 8–9.

These leaves were

R.A.S.C. : Royal Army Service Corps.
Formed in 1888 as Army Service Corps, it was not called Royal until 1918. Its job
was to deliver all supplies including petrol, food and ammunition up to the
front line. In 1965 this branch of the British army was reorganized and renamed
as Royal Corps of Transport.

Plymouth Brothers : Properly called Plymouth Brethren, of briefly “the
Brethren”,this religious sect or
movement without organized ministry was founded around1827 in Dublin.
It was Puritanical in outlook and prohibited many secular occupations for its
members. Its first meeting on English soil was established in Plymouth in 1831,
The movement then soon spread throughout the U.K. and, in time, all over the
world. Adherents are sometimes designated as “Darbyites”, after evangelist John Nelson Darby, one of
the founding figures in Plymouth.

Loki Bound : See note to Descend to earth... in chapter V, above.

The Newcomes : Novel by William Makepeace
Thackeray (1811–1863), first
publisehed in 24 parts in 1853-1855 and very popular in the 19th century. The
book’s subtitle is “Memoirs of a most respectable Family”, and the name of the
principal character is Clive (C. S. Lewis’s official first name).

It is a pity that the accident
of Wordsworth’s habitation and life-long
preference has made him known as a “Lake-Poet”. He is an earth poet. Not the
green earth of the pastoral poetry of Pope and Gray and Philips, but the
ancient bitter earth from which men wrest a living. The earth of Hesiod and of Piers
Plowman.”

Lewis
quoted from this and other passages in the same book in a letter to his brother of 3 March 1940; Collected Letters vol.
II, p. 361.

Although
these hills

Handramit and Harandra: The two main types of landscape on the
planet Malacandra (Mars) in C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet
(1938).

smoke and stir: Milton,
Comus, 5. “In regions
mild of calm and serene air, / Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot /
Which men call Earth...”

I number it among

infinite riches ... a little room: Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of
Malta (ca. 1592), I.1, 37. “Thus methinks should men of judgement frame /
Their means of traffic from the vulgar trade, / And, as their wealth
increaseth, so enclose / Infinite riches in a little room.”

My relations to my father

eating and drinking my own condemnation : 1 Corinthians 11:29. “For he who eats and drinks
without a proper sense of the Body, eats and drinks to his own condemnation” (Moffatt translation).

the Authorized Version: Standard English translation of the
Bible, dating from 1611; King James Bible is (or was) the usual American
name for this translation.

The Syrian captain ... the house of Rimmon: See 2 Kings 5:18.

Chapter XI: Check

chapter
motto

When bale is at highest...: “Sir Aldingar” is a medieval
ballad, included in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1765).

I have already hinted

Edda : Two Icelandic books, containing
between them most of what is now known about Norse mythology, are each called
Edda. The Prose Edda is an early-13th-century Icelandic work by Snorri
Sturluson and hence is also called Snorri Edda; intended as a handbook
for poets, it is a treasure trove of prose retellings and verse quotations of
much ancient mythological lore. The Poetic or Elder Edda is a
13th-century manuscript (discovered in 1643) containing poems on gods and
heroes probably dating from various points in time between the ninth and
eleventh centuries.

Sagas : A saga is an Old Norse
semi-fictional historical narrative, often telling about events in the period
roughly around the year 1000, and written down in the 13th century after a long
oral tradition.

the Ash : Yggdrasill, the “world tree” in Norse mythology. According to
modern interpretations this immense tree was not originally conceived to be an
ash tree but a taxus.

“I should know most and should least enjoy”: Robert Browning
(1812–1889), “Cleon”, 317; the poem was published in Men and Women
(1855). In Browning, the relation between knowing most and enjoying least seems
to be biographical rather than psychological –

While every day my hairs fall
more and more,
My hand shakes, and the heavy yeas increase –
The horror quickening still from year to year,
The consummation coming past escapeWhen I shall know most, and yet least enjoy –
When all my works wherein I prove my worth,
Being present still to mock me in men's mouths,
Alive still, in the praise of such as thou,
I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man,
The man who loved his life so over-much,
Sleep in my urn.

the Wordsworthian predicament... a “glory” had passed away : See Wordsworth’s
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from recollections of early childhood” (1807),
II. “But yet I
know, where’er I go, / That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.” See also the penultimate
paragraph of Surprised by Joy (“I cannot, indeed, complain, like
Wordsworth, that the visionary gleam has passed away.”)

In my scheme

“Why seek ye the living...”: Luke 24:5–6.

If nothing else

by “maistry”: After
Walter Hilton; see note to chapter IV.

Such, then, was

Santayana, “All that is good is imaginary...” : George Santayana (1863–1952),
Spanish-born American philosopher, poet and novelist. The maxim may – ?? – be a paraphrase by Lewis.
According to a quotation in the online Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a similar idea is expressed in the first part,
Persons and Places (1944), p. 167, of
Santayana’s autobiography: “That the real was rotten and only the imaginary at
all interesting seemed to me axiomatic”.
The only books by Santayana which Lewis can be known to
have read, however, are Reason in Art
(1905), Three Philosophical Poets
(1910, on Lucretius, Dante and Goethe), and Winds
of Doctrine (1913). As appears from his diary, he read all of these in
1923-1924.

Unde hoc mihi? : Luke 1:43 in the Vulgate version. “Et unde hoc mihi ut veniat mater Domini mei ad me?” – It is Elisabeth’s
exclamation when Mary enters her house, both women being miraculously pregnant:
“And whence is this to me,
that the mother of my Lord should
come to me?”

Chapter XII: Guns
and Good Company

chapter
motto

La compagnie, de tant d’hommes vous plaist... : “The company of so many noble, young, and active
men delights you; (...) the freedom of the conversation, without art; a
masculine and unceremonious way of living.” Montaigne, Essays, III.13, “On Experience”.

My
first taste

“dreaming spires”: Matthew
Arnold, “Thyrsis” (1866), 19–20. “And that sweet City with her dreaming spires,
/She needs not June for beauty’s
heightening.”

“last enchantments”: Matthew Arnold, Essays in
Criticism, First Series (1865). “Beautiful City! (...) whispering from her towers
the last enchantments of the Middle Age...”

Though I was now

Responsions: In
Oxford, the first of three exams to be passed for obtaining the degree of
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.).

Now, as an alternative

“very heaven” : Wordsworth, French Revolution, as it appeared to
Enthusiasts at its Commencement (1809), 5; The Prelude (1850) XI,
108. “Bliss was
it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”

It was here that I

the humour which is ... (as Aristotle would say) the “bloom” on dialectic itself: Lewis appears to be
making his own use of a “bloom” image somewhere in Aristotle; but the image
itself might be his own, rather than Aristotle’s. This is suggested by the penultimate chapter of Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm, where he refers to
Aristotle’s description of delight
as the “bloom” on an unimpeded
activity; the reference is to Ethics,
1153b, but no bloom actually comes in there.

I can
attribute this

the cynic’s nose,
the odora
canum vis or bloodhound sensitivity... : The Latin words are from Vergil’s Aeneid, IV.132
and
literally mean “the
smelling power of dogs”. Vergil actually means “hunting dogs (with keen
noses)”. The Cynics were an ancient Greek school of philosophy originating at
the Cynosarges gymnasium just outside Athens, ca. 400 B.C. The word “cynic”
seems to stem as much from that gymnasium’s name as – directly – from Cyôn, Greek
for “dog”, since the Cynics’ way of life caused Athenians to compare them to
dogs. Meanwhile it may well be an original idea of Lewis’s to re-connect the
modern meaning of cynicism to this ancient etymology and thus to further
develop that meaning – suggesting the dog’s smelling power as a new point of
comparison.

In 1954 Lewis published a poem titled
‘Odora canum vis: a defence of certain modern biographers and critics’ (now in Collected Poems, 1994) poking fun at
‘disproportioned views on lust’.

H.E.: High Explosive.
Cf. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, XXXI, 4th paragraph, “the stink and taste
of high explosive on the lips...”

Chapter XIII: The New
Look

chapter
motto

This wall I was many a weary month in finishing...: Last words of the paragraph which
begins “So that I had now a double Wall...”, almost exactly half-way Robinson
Crusoe. (This is near the end of chapter XVII in some editions, of chapter
XI in others; Defoe’s original text has no chapters.)The passage comes
a few pages after Robinson Crusoe sees “the print of a man’s naked foot on the
shore” and is “terrify’d to the last degree”. He fits the outer defence wall
around his cave with seven muskets in “frames that held them like a carriage,
that so I could fire all the seven guns in two minutes time.”

The rest of my

Falstaff, Sir Colville : A scene in Shakespeare’s King
Henry IV, second part, IV.3. “Do ye yield, sir, or shall I sweat for
you? .... He saw me, and yielded; that I may justly say with the hook-nos’d
fellow of Rome – I came, saw, and overcame.”

“Blighty” : A word derived from Hindi, designating England as seen from
abroad as a longed-for haven and place of plenty. Metaphorically, it may also
mean an injury which, though not really serious, is just serious enough to
compel (i.e. to justify) a return to England for recovery.

C.C.S. :Casualty Clearing Station.

the water-colour world of Morris : i.e. William Morris
(1834–1896), English poet, painter, socialist and general crusader against
ugliness. See also Lewis’s references to Morris

– in
chapter IX, fourth paragraph from the end (starting “But Homer came first”),
where he describes himself as “a boy soaked in William Morris”

– toward
the end of chapter X, where he describes Morris as “my great author at this
period” whose very name was “coming to have at least as potent a magic” as
Wagner’s

– in
chapter XI, par. 5 (“One thing, however...”), where “the world of Morris became
the frequent medium of Joy”.

– in
chapter XI, par. 18 (“The woodland journeyings...”), where Morris is mentioned
along with Malory, Spenser and Yeats as an author whose works had, for Lewis,
prefigured George MacDonald’s Phantastes.

For a
fuller account of what Morris meant for Lewis, see his letters to Arthur
Greeves of 1 July 1930 and 22 September 1931, in Collected Letters I
(2000), pp. 911 and 970.

Malory : Sir
Thomas Malory (1400?–70), compiler and author of Le Morte Darthur
(1485), a prose rendering in twenty-one books of the Arthurian legends, made up
from the French versions with additions of his own.

The word
“life”

Shelley in The Triumph of Life : Unfinished poem by Percy
Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). It describes a vision of the captive multitude of
humanity, through which the triumphal chariot passes. This is the procession of
Life, the conqueror; chained to the chariot are the great men of history –
vanquished by the mystery of life. The vision is succeeded by the allegory of a
single life which, after a hopeful and aspiring youth, falls victim to the same
mystery; love is the only armour against defeat. The vision is explained to the
poet by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
–– n.b. This note is taken almost
verbatim from Michael Stapleton’s
excellent Cambridge Guide to English Literature (1983).

Barfield of Wadham ... Harwood of The House : “Wadham” is Wadham College in
Oxford; “The House” was a nickname for Christ Church, another Oxford college.
Lewis’s own college in these years
was University College, which was also the one where Hamilton Jenkins
(mentioned in the previous paragraph) began his studies in 1919.

“stop for Fortune’s finger”: Shakespeare, Hamlet III.2,
66 – “...blest
are those / Whose blood and judgment are so well commeddled / That they are not
a pipe for Fortune’s finger / To sound what stop she pleases. Give me that man
/ That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him / In my heart’s core, ay, in
my heart of heart, / As I do thee.”

During
my first two

Mods, Greats: Short
names for Classical Honour Moderations and Final Honour School,
the two parts of Literae Humaniores – a four-year course in classical Greek and Roman literature and philosophy.

For one
thing

an old, dirty, gabbling, tragic, Irish parson:Rev. Dr
Frederick Walker Macran (1866-1947). Several notes on conversations with him
can be found in Lewis’s published diaries of the mid-1920s, All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927, edited
by Walter Hooper (1991), which also has a item on “Cranny” in the Biographical
Appendix.

the very
world, which is the world / Of all of us...: Wordsworth, The
Prelude (1850) XI, 142–144.

delectable
mountains: Episodes in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress I
(1678) and II (1684).

western
gardens: Apparently a generic name for mythical and paradisal places
like Avalon and the garden of the Hesperides (see the end of this paragraph), from Arthurian and Greek
mythology respectively.

Finally, there was

Promethean or Hardyesque : In ancient Greek mythology, Prometheus (“he who thinks ahead”) is a
benefactor of mankind who suffers for his revolt against Zeus.Lewis is combining allusions to the ancient
Greek dramatist Aeschylus, author of the tragedy Prometheus Bound, and
to English novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). The idea to compare Hardy with
Aeschylus was not original to Lewis, and he may have been inspired also by G.
K. Chesterton’s scorn for Hardy’s bitter pessimism and alleged atheism.
In his 1950 polemic with philosopher C. E. M. Joad on
“The Pains of Animals” (in God in the Dock, 1970, p. 171), Lewis
suggested the even more obvious link between the poet Shelley and the
Prometheus theme (Shelley himself wrote a verse drama Prometheus Unbound):

The more Shelleyan, the more Promethean my revolt,
the more surely it claims a divine sanction.

Lewis wrote a paper called “The Promethean Fallacy in Ethics” in
January 1924; see All My Road Before Me, pp. 283, 284, 296.

“I
accept the universe” is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New
England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this
phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: “Gad!
she’d better!” At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is
with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.

The attribution to Carlyle is
doubtful. Lewis first read the passage in William James on 11 June 1922 and was
“pleased to find for the first time Carlyle’s remark about the lady”; see All My Road Before Me: The Diary of
C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927, ed. Walter Hooper (1991). Margaret Fuller
(1810-1850) was a journalist and critic associated to the American literary and
philosophical movement called Transcendentalism, which took much of its
founding inspiration from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first book, Nature (1836).

As for Joy

that whole year of youth...: ??

Barfield’s unhappiness is briefly described in
passages of Lewis’s diary for 5 Mary 1922:

Barfield seemed perfectly miserable and hoping
for nothing. This wretched love affair has gone very deep tho’ it has made him
a real poet. I am sure he is going to be great.(All My Road Before Me, p. 30)

and 24 May 1922:

We
then drifted into a long talk about ultimates. Like me, he has no belief in
immortality, etc., and always feels the materialistic pessimism at his elbow.
He is most miserable. He said however that the “hard facts” which worried us,
might to posterity appear mere prejudices de siècle, as the “facts” of Dante
do to us. Our disease, I said, was really a Victorian one. The conversation
ranged over many topics and finally died because it was impos­sible to hold a
court between two devil’s advocates.(ibid.,
p. 50)

In an undated later diary note, briefly
describing the last two months of 1923, Lewis recorded that

[Barfield] has completely lost
his materialism and “the night sky is no longer horrible”. I read to him in my
diary the description of the talk I had with him in Wadham gardens when he was
still in pessimism, and we enjoyed it.(ibid.,
p. 278)

Barfield never made

Bridges’ Testament of Beauty:
Robert Bridges (1844-1930), English poet, friend and literary executor
of Gerald Manley Hopkins. An anthology from Bridges’s verse and prose titled The Spirit of Man was published in 1916
with a view to the spiritual needs of a country at war. His long philosophical
poem The Testament of Beauty was
published to great acclaim in 1929. Bridges was Poet Laureate from 1913 and
spent his last years in Oxford.

Gilbert Murray(1866-1957) :
Classical scholar, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford 1908-1936. Lewis
attended Murray’s lectures on Euripides almost as soon as he began his regular
studies in January 1919 (Collected
Letters I, p. 426) and also consulted Murray’s work on Greek epic after
reading Hippolytus in 1924 (cf. note
to ch. XIV, below, and Lewis’s diary note for 7 March 1924 in All My road Before Me, p. 299).
In 1955, the 89-year-old Murray appears to have
read Surprised by Joy within a week
after publication and written to Lewis – who replied on 26 September:

Yes, opposite sides of the fence, but in your
middle and my early life the country on both sides had something in common
which distinguished it from the country on both sides now. Hence the
agnosticism of that age is in some ways more congenial to me than the Christianity
of this, and you have changed in my mind only from dolce maestro to dolce nemico.(Collected Letters III, pp. 648-649; the
two Italian terms mean “good teacher” and “good enemy”.)

An
affinity between Murray’ thought and even the mature Lewis is evident from
several passages in Murray’s 1918 presidential address to the Classical
Association, Religio
grammatici.

Lord Russell’s “Worship of a Free Man” :
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), English philosopher, mathematician and prolific
humanist writer and activist; Noble laureate for Literature 1950. His
3,500-word essay “The Free Man’s Worship” was first published in 1903 and later
reprinted as “A Free Man’s
Worship”.

the Jenkinian zest...: A reference to his friend A. K.
Hamilton Jenkin, mentioned in this chapter’s third paragraph. See also chapter
XV, sixth paragraph, “..my Jenkinian love of everything which has its own
strong flavour.” There are many references to Hamilton Jenkin as well as a
short biography of him in Lewis’s diary published as All My Road Before Me
(1991), and letters to him (plus, again, a short biography) in the first two
volumes of Lewis’s Collected Letters.

It is astonishing

“the fuller splendour”behind the “sensuous curtain”: From a passage in The Principles of
Logic by the English idealist philosopher Francis Bradley (1846–1924).

“That the glory of this world (...) is appearance
leaves the world more glorious, if we feel it is a show of some fuller splendour; but the sensuous curtain is a deception (...) if it
hides some colourless movement of atoms, some (...) unearthly ballet of
bloodless categories.”

The words
about “the glory of this world” are also quoted by Lewis in his earlier
autobiographical book, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1932),at the end
of chapter VII/9. I have not traced the exact location in Bradley’s book – ??

The one principle of hell is – “I am my own” : George
MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, Third Series, “Kingship”. This same
quotation is included as No. 203 in C. S. Lewis’s George MacDonald: An
Anthology (1946).

No sooner had I

“freedom” and “gentillesse”: Words from the vocabulary of
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Donne’s maxim : The line quoted is not in Donne but in Shakespeare, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream II.2, 138–139 (Lysander speaking): “For, as a surfeit of the
sweetest things / The deepest loathing to the stomach brings, / Or as the
heresies that men do leave / Are hated most of those they did deceive, / So
thou, my surfeit and my heresy, / Of all be hated, but the most of me!”

Now that I was

Restoration Comedy: Comedies
written in the period following the Restoration of the British monarchy in
1660.

five great men ... Benecke ... (etc.) : The book to read on
Lewis’s academic biotope and philosophical inspiration from colleagues in the
early years of his career as a tutor is James Patrick, The Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901-1945
(Mercer University Press, 1985). The book’s four protagonists are Clement C. J.
Webb (1865-1954), John Alexander Smith (1863-1939), R. G. Collingwood
(1889-1943) and C. S. Lewis respectively, with occasional references to
Carritt, Beneke (not Benecke), Brightman and Onions.

Alanus: Alanus ab Insulis, or Alain de Lille (c.
1125–1203), French scholar, rector of the university of Paris, reputed to be a
universally learned man; author of De planctu naturae (“Nature’s
Lament”, a
satire on human vice) and Anticlaudianus.

much help in
getting over the last stile: The nature of this help from Dyson and Tolkien is described in some
detail in two letters of Lewis to his friend Arthur Greeves, written on 22
September and 18 October 1931; see Lewis’s Collected
Letters, vol. I (2000), pp. 969-972 and 975-977.

H. V. V. Dyson: A typo, both in the first and later British
editions; Dyson’s initials were H. V. D.

The
first move

Hippolytus
of Euripides... certainly no business of mine
at the moment : Euripides (480?-406 B.C.) was one of the three great ancient
Greek tragic playwrights. As appears from Lewis’s diary, it was on 1 March 1924
that he “took Euripides from his
shelf for the first time this many a day, with some idea of reading a Greek
play every week end (when I am not writing) so as to keep up my Greek.” On 3
March he “read the first act of the Hippolytus with great enjoyment.”
The next day he

went on with the Hippolytus – splendid
stuff. I wish I knew how Euripides meant the Nurse to be taken. Some of the
things she says are sublime: others appear comic to us – I fancy only because
we are not simple and matter of fact enough.

Then on 5 March he noted

after some shopping, I trudged home and after
tea went on with the Hippolytus: I read the chorus eelibatois upo
keuthmowsi genoiman. It is strange that for so long I found this mood the
only interesting one – I mean in the old days at Bookham. The whole of my
mental life, even my appreciation of actual nature, was included in that
romantic longing for the Hesperidown meelosporon aktan. I wonder if I
shall be driven back upon it?

The diary fragments of 3 and 5
March are not included in the published text as found in All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1922-1927, edited
by Walter Hooper (1991), but are found in the
unpublished “Lewis Papers”, Vol. VIII.

The passage referred to in Hippolytus is the first strophe
and antistrophe in the play’s
second stasimon, beginning at line
732 (underlined are the two Greek fragments transcribed in the diary). The
chorus comments on the despair that has driven Phaedra, hopeless lover of
Hippolytus, to commit suicide.

Under the arched cliffs O were I lying,
That there to a bird might a God change me,
And afar mid the flocks of the winged things flying
Over the swell of the Adrian sea
I might soar – and soar, – upon poised wings dreaming
O’er the strand where Eridanus’ watersbe,
Where down to the sea-swell purple-gleaming
The tears of the Sun-god’s daughters are streaming,
Of the thrice-sad sisters for Phaëtan sighing,
Star-flashes of strange tears amber-beaming!

O to win to the strand where the apples are growingOf the Hesperid chanters kept in ward,
Where the path over Ocean purple-glowing
By the Sea’s Lord is to the seafarer barred!
O to light where Atlas hath aye in his keeping
The bourn twixt earth and the heavens bestarred,
Where the fountains ambrosial sunward are leaping
By the couches where Zeus in his halls lieth sleeping,
Where the bounty of Earth the life-bestowing
The bliss of the Gods ever higher is heaping!

–– translation Arthur S. Way

Loeb Classical Library vol. 12, Euripides IV (1912), p. 221.

The
next Move

Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity: Samuel Alexander (1859–1938), Australian-born philosopher who first
taught at Oxford and then became Professor of Philosophy in Manchester. His
earliest work was Moral Order and
Progress (1889), an exposition of evolutionary ethics which won him both a
glowing review and the life-long friendship of C. Lloyd Morgan – another pan­theistically-minded
thinker in the wake of recent great developments in biology and physical
science. Alexander’s large two-volume main work Space, Time and Deity (1920) resulted
from his Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow in 1916–1918. In the
preface to the 1927 new edition he states that “the hypothesis of the book is
that “Space-Time is the stuff of which matter and all things are
specifications.” Lewis began reading it on 8 March 1924, as appears from his
diary for that day (published in All My Road Before Me, 1991). The
passage about Enjoyment and Contemplation is in the Introduction:

“Enjoyed”
and “contemplated”For convenience of description I am accustomed to say the mind enjoys
itself and contemplates its objects. The act of mind is an enjoyment; the
object is contemplated. If the object is sometimes called a contemplation, that
is by the same sort of usage by which ‘a perception’ is used for a perceived
object or percept as well as for an act of perceiving. The contemplation of a
contemplated object is, of course, the enjoyment which is together with that
object or is aware of it. The choice of the word enjoyment or enjoy must be
admitted not to be particularly felicitous. It has to include suffering, or any
state or process in so far as the mind lives through it. It is undoubtedly at
variance with ordinary usage, in which, though we are said indeed to enjoy peace
of mind we are also said to enjoy the things we eat, or, in Wordsworth’s words,
a flower enjoys the air it breathes, where I should be obliged to say with the
same personification of the flower that it contemplates the air it breathes,
but enjoys the breathing. Still less do I use the word in antithesis to
understanding, as in another famous passage of the same poet, “contented if he
might enjoy the things which others understand.” Both the feeling and the
understanding are in my language enjoyed. I should gladly accept a better word
if it is offered. What is of importance is the recognition that in any
experience the mind enjoys itself, and contemplates its object or its object is
contemplated, and that these two existences, the act of mind and the object as
they are in the experience, are distinct existences united by the relation of
compresence. The experience is a piece of the world consisting of these two
existences in their togetherness. The one existence, the enjoyed, enjoys
itself, or experiences itself as an enjoyment; the other existence, the
contemplated, is experienced by the enjoyed. The enjoyed and the contemplated
are together.

In the preface to the second
edition of his book (1927) Alexander spent a few more pages (xiii-xxi) on the
subject.

The fox had been

“with all the wo in the world”: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
(anonymous late 14th-century poem) III.23, 1717, about a fox being hunted by a
pack of hounds. “With all
the wo on lyue / To the wod he went away.” See also note to chapter III, motto.

Dom Bede Griffiths: Alan
Griffiths (1906-1993) is the dedicatee of Surprised by Joy. His own
spiritual autobiography was published in a year earlier as The Golden String;
this book is mentioned in chapter XV, par. 8 (starting “As I have said...”). He came to Oxford in 1925 and had Lewis as
his tutor for English literature in 1927–29. On becoming a Benedictine monk in
1933, he took the name Bede, after the 8th-century English church
historian, Beda Venera­bilis. “Dom” was the usual prefix for a Benedictine or Carthusian monk’s name, derived from Latin Dominus, “Lord”.

For of
course there

(in MacDonald’s words) “something to be neither more
nor less nor other than done.” : from a passage near to the end of MacDonald’s essay “A Sketch of
Individual Development” (1880), in the volume A Dish
of Orts (1893); p. 56 in the Electronic Classics edition available at http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/g-macdonald.htm.

... the man shall be the
rightness of which he talked: while his soul is not ... longing to be himself
honest and upright, it is an absurdity that he should judge concerning the way
to this rightness, seeing that, while he walks not in it, he is and shall be a
dishonest man: he knows not whither it leads and how can he know the way! What
he can judge of is, his duty at a given moment – and that not in the
abstract, but as something to be by him done, neither more, nor less,
nor other than done. Thus judging and doing, he makes the only possible
step nearer to righteousness and righteous judgement; doing otherwise, he
becomes the more unrighteous, the more blind. For the man who knows not God,
whether he believes there is a God or not, there can be, I repeat, no judgement
of things pertaining to God. To our supposed searcher, then, the crowning word
of the Son of Man is this, “If any man is willing to do the will of the Father,
he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of
myself.”

Really, a young Atheist

“know of the doctrine”: Gospel
of John, 7:16–17, quoted at the end of the above passage from MacDonald.

My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me. If any man will do his will,
he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of
myself.”

My name was legion: Cf.
Mark 5:10 and Luke 8:30.

Of
course I could

that dreadful valley of Ezekiel’s: Cf. Ezekiel 37:1–14.

“I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am.” : Cf. Exodus 3:14.

You must picture me

That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me: Job 3:25. Lewis used the same phrase
in a very different context in his last book, Letters to Malcolm (1964),
chapter 11. Much more relevant to his experience and view of conver­sion,
however, is the way this quotation from Job appears in George MacDonald’sUnspoken Sermons, Series One (1867), nr.
2, “The Consuming Fire” –

...when we say that God is
Love, do we teach men that their fear of him is groundless? No. As much as they
fear will come upon them, possibly far more. But there is something beyond
their fear, a divine fate which they cannot withstand ... The wrath will
consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall
appear, coming out with tenfold consciousness of being, an bringing with them
all that made the blessedness of the life the men tried to lead without God.
They will know that now first are they fully themselves. ... The death that is
in them shall be consumed.

Lewis
included part of this same passage as nr. 7 in his George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946).

In the Trinity Term of 1929 :The year must in fact have
been 1930, aswas discovered almost
simultaneously, but independently and in different ways, by two Lewis scholars
(Andrew Lazo and Alister McGrath) in
2012. Trinity Term is the last of the three Terms in an academic year in
Oxford, covering the late spring and early summer. The precise day is now
thought to be have been in the first three weeks of June 1930.

compelle intrare, compel them to come in: Luke 14:23. “And the lord said unto
the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in,
that my house may be filled.”

Chapter XV: The
Beginning

chapter
motto

Aliud est de silvestri cacumine videre...: “For it is one thing to see the land of peace from a wooded ridge . .. and
another to tread the road that leads to it.” Augustine, Confessions VII.21.

Thus
my churchgoing

Griffiths ... a copious correspondence : None of this early
correspondence appears to have survived. The earliest of Lewis’s 46 letters
to Griffiths published in the Collected Letters dates from April 1934.

As I have said

protest too much: Shakespeare,
Hamlet III.2, 225; see also the preceding passage in Hamlet for
some skeptical reflections on what Lewis here calls “the great passion or the
iron resolution”. One important place where Lewis expressed very similar ideas
is the passage towards the end of chapter 11 in his novel Perelandra,
where the hero’s great and diffi­cult decision to resist evil is described (“...you
might say that he had been delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had
emerged into unassailable freedom”).

But what, in conclusion

We would be at Jerusalem : After Walter Hilton, The Scale
of Perfection II.21. “What so thou hearest or seest or feelest that should let thee in thy way, abide
not with it wilfully, tarry not for it restfully, behold it not, like it not,
dread it not; but aye go forth in thy way, and think that thou wouldest be at
Jerusalem”, etc.